Neither Suella Braverman nor Konstantin Kisin identify as English. It is odd that they have decided to declare new rules for who can be English – and ones which the broad majority of those who consider themselves as English would reject.
‘He is brown and Hindu – how can he be English?’, Kisin, the fast-talking host of the ‘Triggernometry’ podcast, asked about Rishi Sunak. His assertion that both Sunak’s race and faith should be barriers to others accepting Sunak’s English identity has been endorsed by Suella Braverman too.
We should respect that both Kisin and Braverman identify as British, not English. But we should seek a little reciprocal respect too for those whose English identity they simply dismiss as unlikely, fake or meaningless. The core flaw is that neither Kisin nor Braverman demonstrate even a minimal level of curiosity in understanding the broad English consensus on how people become English.
Kisin’s confusion about the English is easy to anatomise. Born in Russia, before coming here as a schoolboy, he is proud to have naturalised as a British citizen but does not believe Englishness is open to him. In this, he follows what most migrants who have come to England over the centuries have always done. His personal experience underlines something true: that being English is not quite so civic as a British identity. Having spotted that, Kisin mistakenly jumps to the binary assumption that it must be a blood-based ethnic identity instead.
The truth is rather more interesting. English identity today is the product of a little recognised and paradoxical-sounding phenomenon, that of ‘inclusive nativism’. Kisin does not believe that his children, born in England, can identify as English, because of ‘blood’. But they may well come to do so, because of birthplace. While migrants invariably identify as British, rather than English, across most of the last ten centuries, the children and grandchildren of migrants have often felt a birth-right claim to Englishness too, often surprising their Jewish or Irish parents, or increasingly their black, Asian and perhaps, in time, Russian parents too.
So the common sense consensus is that people become English if they are both born in England and identify as English – and so are accepted as English by most English people on that basis.
In calling for a consensus on who can be English, Braverman has not noticed how strongly a common sense consensus has grown on this over the last three decades. Nine out of ten people in England agree that those born here who identify as English should be accepted as such. The number who rejected this has halved between 2012 and 2019, largely because older people noticed the new social norm and adopted it too. (A toxic, racist fringe would reject the claim of Braverman and Kisin to be British: 3% of people believed it important to be white to be truly British when Ipsos Mori asked that in 2020).
This inclusive nativism – that being born and bred in England does count, regardless of skin colour or faith, if you identify as English – is entirely missed by Braverman, who writes dismissively about ‘a plane ticket and a birth certificate’ as if they are the same thing. ‘How many generations must pass before one can claim to be English? Five? Six? It is a question without an easy answer,’ she writes in in her Telegraph piece. The only charitable thing to do with this thought would be to assume that no thought has gone into it whatsoever.
Thoughtlessness could prove an important defence for Braverman. It seems deeply unlikely that she would defend the outcomes that her piece logically entails – when applying it to the specific cases of those who identify as English, without five or six generations of English ancestry. But she would surely lose the Conservative whip were she willing to do that – since it would involve rejecting the English identity – on racial grounds – of many people accepted as English by just about everybody who is not a vocal and overt racist.
Braverman has over 100 Conservative parliamentary colleagues who do identify as English. If she sense-checked her theory with them, she would find it unlikely that any would declare Marcus Rashford and Jude Bellingham too black to be English – nor that Moeen Ali’s declaration of his pride in being English should be rejected on the grounds of his visibly Muslim beard and Pakistani heritage. It may seem even more baffling that the ‘Braverman rules’ would reject Harry Kane and Wayne Rooney as too Irish to be English too.
Overt racists and the far Right did vocally contest this question in the early 1980s. Cyrille Regis was sent a bullet in the post after his England call-up, warning him not to step on the Wembley pitch. An organised National Front contingent chanted ‘one-nil’ when John Barnes put England two-nil up with a brilliant goal in the Maracana in Brazil in 1984 because, to them, black goals did not count. It was a long-settled argument by the time Paul Ince became England’s first black captain in 1993, with no controversy whatsoever.
So sporting symbolism has undoubtedly entrenched this common-sense consensus that English national identity has been multi-ethnic since the 1990s. That is one of the reasons why Asian-English identity is less intuitively familiar than that of the black-English, with little presence in football in particular. But this is not just a question of sport. Braverman – born in Harrow, growing up in Wembley – chooses not to identify as English. That was common in the 1970s and 1980s – but most Asian and black people born in England identify as belonging to England – and most have come to call themselves English as well as British too.
Braverman’s argument is not just centred around her choice not to identify as English. She argues that ethnic minorities ‘should not’ do so – at least before they have five or six generations of ancestry here. This would seem to entail that almost nobody black, Asian, Hindu, Muslim or Jewish who identifies as English would qualify – under Braverman rules – for another couple of generations at least.
Needing English ancestry to identify as English would have left us with an English group containing almost none of those who became English after 948 AD. Today’s clearly multi-ethnic English identity is arguably not so much a rupture as a continuation with how English identity has worked for ten centuries, with those born in England identifying as English and being accepted for doing so.
Yet this 90% consensus on English identity is still underestimated by the opinion-formers in the liberal-left and right-of-centre media – for overlapping and different reasons. The graduate classes, on both the Left and the Right, are more likely to identify as more British than English, so tend to caricature those who identify as more English than British. UK-wide institutions in England tend not to think about an English dimension, as well as about Scotland and Wales, so the social norm reflected in sport is too seldom recognised outside of it. Progressives tend to be excessively pessimistic about the scale of the inter-generational shift against exclusivist, racist attitudes – while those on the Right, seeing racialised thinking increasingly amplified on Elon Musk’s X platform, mistake their echo chambers for public opinion.
The loud effort of parts of the online Right to make Englishness racially exclusive again has little chance of succeeding. It tells us more about the ecosystem of a vocal minority than it does about any change in the increasingly entrenched consensus on how people become English.
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